The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer. Concurrent with the expansion of networking technologies, an expansion in computing power has resulted in development of affordable computing devices capable of taking advantage of services made possible by modern networking technologies. This expansion in computing power has led to a reduction in the size of computing devices and given rise to a new generation of mobile devices that are capable of functionality that only a few years ago required processing power that could be provided only by the most advanced desktop computers. Consequently, mobile computing devices having a small form factor have become ubiquitous and are used to access network applications and services.
In addition, display devices, such as projectors, monitors, or augmented reality glasses, may provide an enhanced view by incorporating computer-generated information with a view of the real world. Such display devices may further be remote wireless display devices such that the remote display device provides an enhanced view by incorporating computer-generated information with a view of the real world. In particular, augmented reality devices, such as augmented reality glasses, may provide for overlaying virtual graphics over a view of the physical world. As such, methods of navigation and transmission of other information through augmented reality devices may provide for richer and deeper interaction with the surrounding environment. The usefulness of augmented reality devices relies upon supplementing the view of the real world with meaningful and timely virtual graphics.
When generating visual representations of virtual or augmented scenes for viewing by a user, a characterization of light throughout the scene can be generated using images or video stitched together, e.g., within a spherical virtual or augmented reality environment, or by characterizing light field data for each light ray in each applicable direction at each position within the representation. Image or video stitching techniques typically result in relatively low quality representations of light effects within an image or video. Alternatively, light field representation can include computationally intensive and time-consuming characterization of every light ray at every point in the representation. Despite the computationally intensive matching of every ray at every point and despite alternatively using a high sampling rate for interpolative approaches, some points representing occluded objects, for instance, return insufficient characterization data to render the ray and image quality suffers. Additionally, the bandwidth required to transmit light field representations of a scene, e.g., to/from a remote server, to a user device, to a display, etc., can be significantly higher than required to transmit a stitched image or video representation, e.g., 360 video, 3D video, etc., of the same scene. On the other hand, present techniques for mixing light field data of, e.g., different objects or different sources into one image or video are very complex. Thus, there is a long-felt need in the industry for a method, apparatus, and computer program product for generating visual representations having improved image quality according to a less computationally intensive approach.